Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (4 page)

 
          
 
He ignored her. "Who's gonna pay for it?
These places have to cost—"

 
          
 
"Insurance," said Warren.
"Every dime."

 
          
 
"But . . . but . . ." Doors were
slamming in Preston's head, shutting off avenues of escape. "I don't have
any clothes. I don't even have a toothbrush!"

 
          
 
Preston saw that, unwittingly, he had given
Margaret a cue. Sucking in her cheeks and cocking an eyebrow to show smarmy righteousness
(one of her more annoying personal habits), she stood and went behind his desk
and returned with a packed suitcase, which she deposited on the floor before
him.

 
          
 
Preston sensed that he was falling through a
slick dark cylinder with no bottom. He put out a hand to Warren. "What
about the Benson book? It needs a lot of work. And the Gregory. The Gregory is
in big—"

 
          
 
“I’ll take the Benson. And I thought I'd give
Debbie a crack at the Gregory . . . show what she can do on her own.”

 
          
 
"Debbie?" Preston said, gagging.
"Debbie Browning?"

 
          
 
"She's talented, Scott. You've said so
yourself."

 
          
 
I'm being gang-banged from every quarter.
"Jesus, Warren, it's great to be indispensable."

 
          
 
"It's because we do need you that we're
doing this, Scott. If we didn't care, I'd give you your walking papers right
now."

 
          
 
Dolores Stark nodded to Kimberly.

 
          
 
With quavering voice barely audible, Kimberly
said, "We don't want to lose you. Daddy."

 
          
 
Preston slumped in his chair and squeezed his
eyes. These people have no decency. They will stop at nothing.

 
          
 
Dolores Stark rose and went to Preston and put
a hand on his shoulder. He loathed being touched by strangers. He recoiled, but
she did not remove her hand. She smiled. Of course. Nothing surprised this
woman.

 
          
 
"Bet you wish you had a drink right
now."

 
          
 
Impulsively, ludicrously,
Preston
began to deny it, but then he saw in her
eyes a wisdom born of pain and exuding sympathy. He believed for the first time
that she truly knew things about him that he didn't. Wordlessly, he nodded.

 
          
 
"I did, too." She grinned.
"When they came for me five years ago, I raced into the John and drank a
quart of Scope."

 
          
 
Preston was appalled at the effect her words
had on him. Even as he reacted, he didn't believe it. He felt that she had just
kissed him—not sexually but spiritually—and that the kiss had somehow shrunk
the tumor of loneliness that had been blooming in his guts. He gaped at her.

 
          
 
Still smiling, she said, “Let's have a
shooter, then.”

 
          
 
Margaret jerked in her chair. Kimberly bounced
as if hers were on fire.
Warren
frowned and smoothed his hair and said, "Actually, I'm not
entirely sure that's . . ." He trailed off. But none of them did anything.

 
          
 
Dolores Stark circled the room, gazing at the
bookcases, reciting titles to herself. She stopped and stood on tiptoe and
pulled a book off a top shelf. She read the title aloud: "A la Recherche
du Temps Perdu."

 
          
 
If
Preston
had
not already concluded that Dolores Stark was the Uri Geller of the booze
business, he would have been surprised. As it was, he was almost amused as he
watched her open the hollow book and pull out the half-full pint of 100-proof
vodka.

 
          
 
“Proust is a safe stash. Nobody ever reads
Proust." She uncapped the bottle and started toward
Preston
, for some reason taking the long route
around behind the desk. She stopped six feet from him and held out the bottle.

 
          
 
What was she doing? Just give me the bottle!
She wanted him to fetch it, to grovel for it. But why? I thought you were my
friend!

 
          
 
He lunged for the bottle. His hand was six
inches from it when she upended it, and eight ounces of salvation drooled into
the wastebasket. He stopped, his hand still extended, a clot of bile rising in
his throat.

 
          
 
"Whoops!" said the heartless,
vindictive harpy. She picked up the wastebasket and sloshed the vodka around
the scummy bottom. Then she took a step toward him. “One last social drink
before we go?" A nasty grin crinkled her stony face. “Sorry I don't have a
twist."

 
          
 
He hesitated for a second, no more, but long
enough for Kimberly to see that he was tempted. Her look of ashen horror
engraved itself on the tablets of his mind.

 
          
 
He slumped back in his chair, his face
contorted by a racking sob.

 
          
 
Dolores Stark set the wastebasket on the floor
and said cheerily, “Welcome to the rest of your life."

 
          
 
He would have skipped from Kennedy
Airport—would have found a motel with a cool, dark bar and spent a couple of
days thinking things over—if Dolores Stark hadn't latched on to him like a
Velcro suit and stuck with him from the office to the plane.

 
          
 
He would have dodged into the men's room and
knocked back six ounces of Dr. Smirnoff’s finest from the pewter flask in his
briefcase, if she hadn't searched him like a zealous nanny and confiscated the
flask, as well as the foil-wrapped packet of Valium that he always carried in
his watch pocket, just in case.

 
          
 
He would have at least managed a few quick
see-throughs on the plane if the virago hadn't had the appalling bad taste to
summon a supervisor and instruct him to tell the chief stewardess that Preston
was not under any circumstances to be permitted to consume anything—including
not only beverages but also sauces, condiments, garnishes and flavorings—that
contained ethyl alcohol. She even warned him that
Preston
might feign cardiac arrest in a desperate
attempt to con a beaker of brandy from a naive flight attendant.
Preston
saw the supervisor sneak glances at him
over Dolores Stark's shoulder. He hated being noticed, cherished privacy and
anonymity and the freedom they gave him to keep his little secrets. Now he had
been publicly branded as a loon.

 
          
 
For two thousand miles he sat in his seat and
felt the stewardesses eyeball him as if he were a Palestinian terrorist. When
he went to the John, two of them hustled the liquor cart out of his way and
guarded it like wrens protecting their eggs.

 
          
 
As the plane touched down in
Santa Fe
,
Preston
had
to admit that he felt virtuous: This was the first time in his adult life he
had flown sober. He had always believed that flying in an airplane was
unnatural if not downright impossible, a patent violation of reality. The
unanesthetized mind analyzes the experience and must conclude that it cannot be
happening. The only way a rational man can endure flying, therefore, is to
distance himself from the fact that it is happening. To
Preston
, there were but two groups of people who
could fly sober, those whose critical faculties had been permanently damaged,
and pilots, who had been conditioned to worship machines beyond all reason. So
virtuous did he feel that he decided to reward himself with a drink or two. He
deserved them, of course-—after a day like this, he deserved a Jeroboam— but he
also needed them, if he was to suffer through an afternoon and evening of Mickey
Mouse bullshit, slogans (“Welcome to the rest of your life," she had said
to him. Jesus!) and facile and phony protestations of love and hope. He had
edited enough self-help books to know that in the universe of therapies,
everybody always loves everybody. He did not love everybody. And as for hope,
he had found it to be a one-way ticket to disappointment.

 
          
 
He had had four hours to think, and he had
decided a few things. His wife, daughter and employer believed that he had a
drinking problem. So, ipso facto, a problem existed. But to
Preston
, the problem was largely one of
perspective. None of them drank at all—oh, a glass of wine now and then, but
that wasn't drinking. If he had married the girl he squired around the watering
holes of
New
Haven
back in the sixties, a giddy tippler who could bend an elbow with the best of
them, the perceptions of him would have been entirely different. He wondered
where she was. She had been brought up, as he had (and as Margaret and Warren
definitely had not), to recognize booze as a fine tool to be used judiciously
for the relief of anxiety and stress. She would have understood that the only
way
Preston
could shuffle along from day to day was to
take periodic chemical holidays from himself. She wouldn't have called that a
problem, not when he had never missed a day's work, never had a drunk-driving
conviction, never brawled or made a public display of himself. She would have
known that the memory lapses
Warren
trotted out as ammunition were just . . .
memory lapses. Everybody has them.

 
          
 
Warren and Margaret didn't understand, because
they couldn't.

 
          
 
If in the land of the blind the one-eyed man
is king, then in the land of the teetotaler the social drinker is a rummy.

 
          
 
Dolores Stark was convinced he was an
alcoholic.

 
          
 
But on what did she base her conviction? On
what she had heard from Margaret and Warren (and from Kimberly, though she
wasn't a reliable witness, having been primed by Margaret). Dolores Stark
didn't know him, couldn't appreciate what it was like to live inside his head.

 
          
 
Exactly what was an alcoholic, anyway? He bet
that if you put a hundred people into a room, you couldn't get three of them to
agree on a definition. Legend had it that Ulysses Grant was an alcoholic, but
then Lincoln was supposed to have said something like: "If liquor fueled
the job Grant did for this nation, then I'll have a case of whatever he's
drinking." Winston Churchill kick-started every morning with brandy and
kept pour-ling it on all day long. The stereotype was the bum who slept in a
doorway and drank Thunderbird from a bag, but maybe he was the same guy who
used to sleep on a couch in Pound Ridge and drink Cutty Sark.

 
          
 
It was all a question of perceptions.

 
          
 
He didn't blame Dolores Stark for her
perceptions. She was in the salvage business. She had to believe he was a wreck
wallowing in despair. She had to label him and try to convince him that the
label fit. After all, she (Could hardly coax somebody into treatment—which
,was, remember, the way she made her living; more than a little element of
self-interest there—by hinting that now and then he overserved himself with
margaritas. She'd be out of work in a week.

 
          
 
And
Preston
wasn't knocking treatment. There were people who needed it. No question.
Especially for drugs. When drugs got their claws into you, they didn't let go.
You had to be cleaned out, then broken down and built up again. And there were
probably people for whom booze was like that. They couldn't give it up. They
were hooked. Treatment was the only way out.

 
          
 
For him, though, it was overkill, like
treating sniffles with penicillin. He could have quit on his own. It would have
taken him a few more false starts, but he could have done it. Sure, sure, he
knew the old joke: "I have no trouble quitting; I do it all the
time." But what had been missing was motivation, and now he had that. What
distinguished him from the true alcoholic who could never quit on his own was
the fact that (except on certain days like today),
Preston
didn't need alcohol. He liked alcohol. There
was a difference.

 
          
 
But he would humor them, at least for a while.
He'd join the roster of movie stars and country singers, rock drummers and
middle linebackers, who had put The Banner Clinic on the map. A stint at Banner
was almost a required credential for the Beautiful People these days.

 
          
 
Mostly, he was going in because no matter what
he thought, Margaret's threats and
Warren
's were real. Maybe they were overreacting,
maybe they were misguided, but they had the power to cause him a lot of pain, and
he had quite enough pain these days, thank you very much. How long he would
stay was another matter.

 
          
 
Besides, who could say that he wouldn't get
anything out of it? He might learn something. The worst that could happen was
that he'd dry out for a while. On full salary. That couldn't hurt. Everybody
could use a good flushing. He might even meet some celebrity lush who would
write about his or her experience.

 
          
 
Sign 'em up. Celebrity confessions were
selling like Big Macs.

 
          
 
Everybody benefits. Virtue plus twenty
percent.

 
          
 
Meanwhile, he had to concentrate on how to
wrap his fingers around a couple of quick pops before he met he driver from
Banner. He had been told that the driver would meet the plane, which he assumed
meant—what with airport security precautions—that he'd be waiting it the
baggage carousel.

 
          
 
He stood up before the plane stopped—incurring
from 1 stewardess a baleful glare but no reprimand because, lie figured, she
was still afraid that if she said anything aggressive he might go into apeshit
DTs—and worked his way to the front. It had to take fifteen or twenty minutes
to unload everyone from an L-1011, so if he was first off, he'd have plenty of
time to down a brace of white ones. Hell, four or five. Skate into the clinic
on a nice comfortable cloud.

 
          
 
The plane stopped, the door hissed open, he
stepped out onto the ramp—and immediately a hand the size of a spare tire
grabbed him by the arm.

 
          
 
"Scott Preston?" said a voice as
resonant as the voice of James Earl Jones.

 
          
 
He looked up into the face of Lawrence
Taylor—or his big brother—the most gargantuan man he had ever stood
face-to-face with. At least six feet six, an easy three hundred pounds. He was
wearing white trousers, white running shoes, a starched white short-sleeved shirt
and a black necktie.

 
          
 
He lowered his nose to
Preston
's mouth, sniffed and said, "You
clean?"

 
          
 
Preston
gasped. "I beg your—"

            
"You sober?"

 
          
 
Preston
tried to summon outrage, but his "Of course!" came out as a squeak.

 
          
 
"Good. Makes life easier for both of
us." He steered

 
          
 
Preston
down the ramp. As they stepped into the terminal, he said to an airline agent,
''Thanks, Harold."

 
          
 
''Anytime, Chuck. Pilot said this one was a
pussycat."

 
          
 
This one? What was he, a chimpanzee? The pilot
had been talking about him? Over the radio? Screw this, he'd had enough. He
tried to pull away. Not a chance. His arm would separate from his body before
it would escape from the vise at the end of Chuck's arm.

 
          
 
With gentle upward pressure, Chuck had him
scuttling along on tiptoe.

 
          
 
"Okay, I give,"
Preston
said. "Time out."

 
          
 
Chuck set him down and looked at him and
seemed to decide that
Preston
would not flee the jurisdiction. He nudged
Preston
forward and shortened his step to
synchronize their paces.

 
          
 
They passed a bar. The bottles standing
against the mirrored wall were illuminated from above, and they glowed with a
magical light. Half a dozen men were crouched on stools, their hands cuddling
cold glasses filled with warmth.
Preston
felt an ache, of envy, of nostalgia. He imagined that he was a sailor setting
off on a voyage of unknown duration into unknown seas, looking back at his
loved ones waving from the shore.